A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics

Streamlined access to our research resources from off campus

Published April 4, 2020 by Mark Bodnar

As we all settle into a work-from-home routine, I'm pleased to announce that there is a new tool -- LibKey Nomad -- to help you with (almost) seamless off-campus access to many of our library's journal article subscriptions.

This Chrome Browser extension can be installed with just a couple clicks. Once you have it equipped, it will scan for scholarly content as you browse the Internet. When it detects that you've landed on the page of a journal article available in our online collection, it will drop a little Download PDF button onto the page. Click, authenticate as an SFU researcher, and you're in!

Check out this example of LibKey Nomad in action:

Screen capture of a portion of the site of an academic article ("Deepfakes: Trick or treat?") with the LibKey button circled.

OK, it's usually that smooth, but nothing is perfect. LibKey Nomad doesn't catch cases where we get the fulltext of articles through 3rd-party aggregators (e.g., many of the fulltext articles in databases like Business Source Complete) that we don't also get directly from publishers.

It also doesn't cover the non-scholarly content that is so important in Business & Economics research: news articles (Factiva), industry reports (IBISWorld), market analysis (Frost & Sullivan and Passport), company financials (S&P Capital IQ), and time series data (Data Planet). And it doesn't cover the thousands of ebooks in our collection (Library Catalogue).

For those types of non-scholarly-article resources you still need to link in to each database through the library's site. Check out my earlier post for a short list of some of the most popular Business & Economics resources available.

And LibKey isn't the only "shortcut" tool for linking in to our journal articles from web searches: there's also the SFU Library Bookmarklet tool designed to be used in most browsers. Plus you can set up Google Scholar to embed Get@SFU links in the citations of your search results -- allowing for a one-click check of our subscriptions:

Screen capture of an article citation in Google Scholar search results, with the "Get@SFU" link next to it circled in red.

Learn about all these options (and more) in our guide: Accessing online resources from off campus.

Hope that helps!

Take care,

-- Mark
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Mark Bodnar
mbodnar@sfu.ca
Economics & Business Librarian